A new project..

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A new project..

I am planin to start a new project using ASP(3.0).. It is a web search for small homepages... Where all the home pages are indexed and produces result based on the search string by a visitor... I am planin to have a control pannel and all that stuff...

Now i am in a fix.. I am not sure wheathe i should use access or just a plain text file to hold everything.. If i use access many users wont be able to use my script if their service provider does not provide database support but if i use a normal test file.. all manipulation, search will be a tuff job.. what do you recomend...

Re: A new project..

Originally posted by vasanth I am planin to start a new project using ASP(3.0).. It is a web search for small homepages... Where all the home pages are indexed and produces result based on the search string by a visitor... I am planin to have a control pannel and all that stuff...

Now i am in a fix.. I am not sure wheathe i should use access or just a plain text file to hold everything.. If i use access many users wont be able to use my script if their service provider does not provide database support but if i use a normal test file.. all manipulation, search will be a tuff job.. what do you recomend...

PHP/Perl & MySQL. There aren't many web hosts that have ASP&Access support (except maybe Brinkster). PHP, Perl and MySQL are more common and better.

for making a searchengine for an abstract webpage, u don;t really need a database.... ASP can do the job alone if u are willing to code it. I came across a script once that searched all the pages' contents (in folders) in a website excluding the ones u specified. i modified it quite a bit to fit my needs. i'll c if i can find the website where i got it from. it'll give u some idea of how to get the script working without a DB.

Originally posted by Commander for making a searchengine for an abstract webpage, u don;t really need a database.... ASP can do the job alone if u are willing to code it. I came across a script once that searched all the pages' contents (in folders) in a website excluding the ones u specified. i modified it quite a bit to fit my needs. i'll c if i can find the website where i got it from. it'll give u some idea of how to get the script working without a DB.

wont that be slow.. i have to search all the pages whenever a search is done...

Well, rather than Access why not use XML? I expect ASP has some sort of XML parser built in so it shouldn't be that hard to implement. It will make it easier to parse for you since you dont have to code it (if its built in).

If I remember correctly PHP has a way of simply reading in a file, and puts all the XML nodes/tags/contents into a tree thats really easy to use. If ASP can do that then it will make it much easier for you than reading a text file, but saves you using a database.

Plus, using XML will make it much easier to write future applications using the same file (for instance, it wouldn't take long to port it to access I doubt).

Edit: Although it depends how big the site is. If theres hundreds of pages it would be much easeir to have the content all in a database, and only use ASP (so everything dynamic anyway). Just as long as the XML files not huge.

any good XML tutorial from scrathch you know of.. eomstin like an E book.. please post links if you have any.. i have herd a lot about XML but never bothered to know what it actually is.. may be this is a good time to start it

ASP does support xml....i know that much. but then if u want to add xml, won;t u have to make all your pages in a way so a xml parser is ables to read them?

and as for the script being slow, it's not that slow, in a matter of fact, if customized correctly, it can be preety fast. u can see a demo and download it here. i didn;t realize i got the script from there.

Its an extremely useful language to learn, because its not a programming language but a way of storing data and defining how the elements all work together. Its even more simpler than HTML because you dont care how it looks, just the data it holds.